Thoughts on resuming Plato, Apology of Socrates

After an interlude of reading the Greek New Testament books of the gospel according to John, and the acts of the apostles, I have resumed reading the Apology of Socrates. I gave up the first effort, because the work was too hard. Plato is going better now. I believe reading a hundred pages or so of relatively easy Greek would help anybody overwhelmed by Plato. The NT is a good choice because the sentences are not too complicated. Besides this, for me, there was some familiarity with the English Bible. Then there is the fact that a NT lexicon gives an entry for every single word variation. You need not have the forms perfectly memorized. Moreover, looking up every unknown word provides much form study.

I frequently used the Perseus presentation of the NT books, which gives the Vulgate Latin translation for comparison. Comparison with the Vulgate was often very helpful in making out a puzzling Greek sentence. For example, it seemed to me that Jerome, when he could do it, translated Greek participles into Latin participles.

Although I am a church-going man, I did not read with devotional intention. Instead, I put on my history-guy hat, and read as I’d read other documents containing declarations about the past. I skimmed some elementary commentaries on matters of date of composition, authorship, and so on. I assumed the NT books were written by historical persons, using human-produced sources available to them.

So, now I’m back to Plato. Here is what I have on my desk. The printed student commentaries of both Steadman and Helm, a paper form of Liddell & Scott abridged, Morwood’s Oxford Grammar of Classical Greek. Now and then I consult Smyth, but much less often than Morwood. I have the Atticos app on my Ipad Mini. This app has been very helpful. See here: https://attikos.org/

I also use my desktop computer, but that requires me to change chairs, because the books already mentioned take up so much space on my physical tabletop. So, I have two different little study worlds on the same big table: the world of my computer, and the world of my physical books and my notebook. Nine-tenths of the time I work with the physical books. The most important reason for this is that I write notes by hand, systematically in spiral bound notebooks. Usually I write down the sentence, one word after the other until I see a difficult word. I give that word a separate line, and do the necessary study, and make notes on that. This is not so much for later restudy, but rather because I believe handwriting notes helps one remember, even if you never see the note again.

I finished reading the Apology a few weeks ago. Burnett’s commentary (in a volume with the Euthyphro and Crito) is very helpful. It gives a lot of background info that you need to understand the text. I also used Helm. There is not much overlap. Burnet’s commentary is considered by many to be essential.

Mark

Hi Hugh,

Thank you very much for the Attikos link! That is a far superior app to what I have been using (Ancient Greek from Romansgohome.com).

Thanks to Mark for the tip on John Burnett. I’m delighted that Aetos, who has given me much help in the past, likes the Atticos app.

Good luck Hugh! Sounds like you’re well-armed with resources.

If you still find it hard the second time around, perhaps:

  • work out what in particular is causing you to get stuck (syntax? word order? the arguments? something else?), and


  • in the meantime, have a go at a short Socratic dialogue.

The Apology is quite unusual in the Socratic dialogues: mostly a set-piece rhetorical monologue, with only a little embedded dialogue in the middle. There are rhetorical monologues in some of the other Socratic dialogues too (and lengthy rhetorical set pieces in later dialogues like the Phaedrus). Despite that, reading the other Socratic dialogues is quite a different experience to reading the Apology, and worth trying out if you haven’t had the chance yet.

Cheers, Chad

I don’t know much about Plato or the Apology of Socrates, but I wanted to say that I also found Burnet very helpful.

Many thanks to Chad and Paul for calling my attention to John Burnett. I found an online copy here.

https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b6865&view=1up&seq=191

I also have an ebook copy of the Cambridge green&yellow commentary.

Hi Hugh, that would be Mark and Paul!

Cheers, Chad

Hi Hugh,

To follow up on Chad’s advice to start with a dialog first, now that you have Burnet, you might want to start with the Euthyphro. After reading that dialog you will be better prepared for the Apology. It introduces the court case, demonstrates that teaching technique that Socrates talks about in the Apology and gets you familiar with a lot of the vocabulary.

Mark

I’ve taken seriously the advice to read first the Euthyphro, but I’ll stick with the Apology for now, for existential reasons, which out of respect to Chad, Paul, and Mark I’ll explain.

Much of my textkit-related reading consists of books I read long ago in English back in the late 1950s (I’m B.A. 1960). It’s a sentimental journey (or a sentimental re-education) you might say.

Besides that, my present energy is used up by the work required to understand the literal meaning of the sentences one after the other. I know that I miss much of the continuity of the texts I read, as well as meanings that would be enabled by greater knowledge of the historical context.

Many thanks for the help!

Hugh, I just want to comment that your commitment to succeed is a real encouragement, both to those starting out and to those of us who have been at this for a while. As they used to say, keep on keeping on!